Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 00:55:54 -0400 From: "Allen Smith" <easmith@beatrice.rutgers.edu> To: Chen Hsiung Chan <frankch@waru.life.nthu.edu.tw>, Jun-ichiro itojun Itoh <itojun@iijlab.net> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <9806120055.ZM11421@beatrice.rutgers.edu> In-Reply-To: Chen Hsiung Chan <frankch@waru.life.nthu.edu.tw> "Re: internationalization" (Jun 12, 12:42pm) References: <199806120309.UAA11238@usr09.primenet.com> <2754.897624427@coconut.itojun.org> <19980612124245.33715@waru.life.nthu.edu.tw>
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On Jun 12, 12:42pm, Chen Hsiung Chan (possibly) wrote: > On Fri, Jun 12, 1998 at 01:07:07PM +0900, Jun-ichiro itojun Itoh wrote: > [deleted] > > >The point is not a reduction in an alphabetic symbol space, as in > > >your A-F example. > > >A switch from Kanji to Kana would not damage the ability to represent > > >any Japanese words; it's a switch from an ideogrammatic to an > > >alphabetic representation. > > > > bzzzz, you are wrong. We Japnaese can't live without Kanji. > > Kanji is not an extra character sets. Kanji is mandatory > > character set for us, just like G-Z for you. Believe me, > > I speak and write Japanese every day :-) > > That's also true for Chinese. We can not live with only > phonetic symbols, whether that be bopomofo or pinyin or > anything else. Umm... so Chinese people can't talk to one another? I'd known that was the case between the dialects, but not within them :-}. Now, I'm not claiming that any of the current phonetic representations are necessarily fully usable - for instance, IIRC Chinese is a tonal language, and a phonetic representation that didn't encompass tonalities would be incomplete - but that the space of sounds emitable by the human voice is smaller than the number of Chinese characters, Kanji, etcetera, and people are capable of conversing in Mandarin, Japanese, etcetera vocally. What I would therefore suggest is that whatever standard is used (e.g., Unicode) should contain within it characters for phonetic representation - probably using one of the standard linguist's representations, possibly with expansions where that is inadequate - and this will allow it to represent all non-alphabetic languages that are capable of being spoken. -Allen To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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